


4.02: Safe As Houses

by Amand_r



Series: Torchwood, Season Four [4]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:58:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Houses collapse in Splott, and Jack holds the answer to the mystery.  Just one problem: he doesn't work for Torchwood anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	4.02: Safe As Houses

The baby's face was chubby, but in that charming way that said he was happy and bright and well nourished. As Jack looked at the picture he imagined the fat gliding over the myelin sheaths in little Duncan's head. He's going to be smart, this one, with two parents like that, knowing what they knew, all the bright and shining tech of the future at his mam's fingertips.

Jack slid the picture back across the table and Gwen tucked it into a slim billfold that probably held paper bills and three plastic cards. It was good to travel light. She slipped it back into her pocket and picked up her coffee.

"He's cute," Jack said over the rim of his mug. "He has your eyes."

She grimaced into the ceramic in her hands. "Hopefully not my teeth."

Jack snorted.

They sat in silence, the coffeehouse almost empty around them. Gwen had flashed an ID and asked that they stay late. There was an exchange of bills, and Jack was reminded of the privilege of Torchwood in Cardiff, something he'd flaunted for so long. Now he was like that barista, rotating around the gravitational pull of Gwen and her money and rank (if that was the word for it).

"So you're at a hotel?"

He stared at her, tried to read her face, but he'd been gone too long, been looking at faces that hadn't resembled human ones too often, and he'd lost the knack for understanding what her eyes said when they looked at him like that. A year was too long. Was it only a year? A year and a few months? A few turns in a pleasure bubble set to low spin had eradicated three years worth of grief, and Jack had nothing but time to rotate in the thing for three weeks, living his life in fast forward while the universe around him spun forever in slow motion, a ball of yarn rolling in a straight line into the distance, never ending.

"Yeah," he said, giving up on trying to understand what she might have been saying.

"So, how was the universe?"

He smiled. "Filled with more broken hearts, now." As soon as he said it he realised that it was the wrong thing. "Shit."

Gwen finished her coffee and turned her cup upside down on the saucer. "Why are you here?"

He thought about it. It was pointless to beat around the bush, really. What could he say that would be a lie that wouldn't sound like a lie? How could he dress it up for her? What ribbons could he truss it up with to make it appeal?

"I want to come back." Ah, the truth ribbon, then.

Gwen sat back in her chair, and he knew just from her seat that her legs were uncrossed, she was sprawled, and this relaxed Gwen was the leader of Torchwood Three, and she was everything he had thought she could be on the nights when he had thought of her, of what he had left behind for her. She was probably better than he was, forward-thinking and hard-nosed. She was human, and she had the past experience of his complete failure to use as a guidebook of what not to do.

Okay, some of those nights had been in the pleasure bubble, as well. Gwen was fit. Owen had once taught him the word MILF. Jack had forgotten what it meant, but he vaguely felt that it applied now. Something to look up online later tonight.

But truth, that was dull and sad sounding, wasn't it? He sipped from his coffee and stared out at the emptying Quay. Eleven o' clock and all children should be in bed; it was a school night.

"Come back to Torchwood? Whatever for?" She waved a hand, and he knew this was about to be his dressing-down. Not the punch, that had been instinctual (and hey, ow), but the intellectual thing, the emotional speech that she'd probably been composing in her head since he'd shot up to that ion carrier and left her with all…this.

"You have all of time and space at your disposal, Jack Harkness," Gwen murmured, her eyes wide and her face amused. Rather like the day she'd told him she was engaged. He'd just come back that time, too. He was always coming back to Gwen, if not for her _per se_. Surely she wouldn't say yes a second time.

A boy and girl tangoed past the shop window and they both stopped to watch for a second as the girl laughed, her young man spinning her and dipping her, and Jack wanted to smile, but his face felt frozen; he settled for sighing and setting his chin on his hand as he watched.

Gwen smiled. Of course. She was allowed.

"So? What happened? No one out there that you fancied? Come back for a bit of laverbread and cockles?" Heavy emphasis on the 'cock' part there. "I know how much you love those vowels."

"You're right, you're right. Look," he leant further towards her, lowering both of his hands on the table. If her hands had been on the top, he might have grasped them, but she scooted her chair back just a bit, as if she didn't want him to touch her. "I couldn't. I just. Everywhere I went it was just more of the same. More variety, but the same thing over and over again."

"The devil you know?" Her eyes were hard. "How soon till you bugger off again?"

Jack shrugged. "I don't know. Can't make those kinds of promises."

"Reassuring. So far, this is a bad rehiring interview."

He started for a moment, and then he thought about it. Of course he wouldn't be coming back to take over. It hadn't occurred to him that he would, and even as he had sat here and thought of her being in charge, it still hadn't connected in his skull that she would be the one issuing his marching orders. Of course she would.

"I got lonely," he said finally, eyes watching the boy turn his girl on the paving stones and bring her face in for a kiss. "I have time to live, linear time, and I want to live it here." His eyes cut back to her. "For now. For real."

Gwen's jaw set, and she shook her head. "Oh Jack, I—" she stopped abruptly eyes closing. "I was going to say, 'too little, too late', but that's rather one of the points here, isn't it?"

He didn't reply, just turned back to look out at the couple. They were young, teenagers, maybe, their lives fresh and full of promise, like the first page in a new blank journal, like the clear pool of freshly drawn bath water.

Like a picture of a baby with a pair of round Welsh eyes.

Gwen opened her eyes then, and he saw her in the corner of his vision. Her limbs moved, liquid and tired. He wondered what she'd done today. Had she been chasing weevils, pushing pencils? Who was on her team? They would have to be all-new. She might have lured some people away from UNIT, but he doubted it. Gwen would want people for singular personal qualities, and not just technical abilities. She would have thought about balance and precision. She would have let them fall into her lap, or looked for them outside the box.

"I don't know, Jack," she said, standing. He mirrored her, and snagged his coat from the back of his chair. "My team is complete, but—"

"I know," he said hastily, tossing some bills on the table, even though she had paid in advance. He wasn't going to let Torchwood pay for anything of his, not now.

"But," Gwen said, picking up where he'd interrupted her, holding up a hand, "I can think of some uses for you." She studied him, her eyes running up and down his face and shoulders, her head tilted. Whatever she was thinking was business, not pleasure. Pity. "I'll have to clear it with my team," she finished before walking out into the walkway of the Quay, leaving him to catch up with her.

Unexpected. Or expected. Or something. He hadn't actually thought past saying her name once he saw her, so all in all, he was sure that this was going pretty well.

Still. "Don't make it a democracy, Gwen," he warned, and then realised that he was already breaking his own rule of not giving unwanted advice this time around.

She smiled. "Oh, it's not, but you're a special bomb to drop, Jack." She reached out to run her hand down the side of his face and he tilted into it. Okay, that was involuntary and also horrifyingly needy. "So, please tell me you're at the Altolusso," she muttered.

He gave her a smile. "The Hilton. Living the high life, baby." Gwen's eyes sparkled and she laughed, jamming her hands in her pockets and shaking her head. "What? What's so funny?"

* * *

 

Dav covered his head with a pillow and tried to block it out. It was impossible. Everyone else in the neighbourhood seemed to be doing just fine—he hadn't heard any shouts or screams to shut it the hell up, but then again, Dav wasn't sure he would have heard them, what with the bass in the car outside all bent on re-arranging the molecular make-up of his ear membranes or summat.

The windows rattled in their panes and he could feel it come through the floor, shake the bed and hit him with wave after wave of _bwommmm, bwum-bum bwommmmmmmm_ over and over again. Dav glanced at his clock. It was four-fifty.

"Some of us have jobs," he grumbled, tossing the covers back. The other side of the bed was empty. Gloria'd taken the night shift for the next month, and he didn't realise just how much he missed her until he had all that extra space on the mattress.

When he stood and blinked out the window at the car, it blurred in and out of his vision with every _bwommmm_ , and that was because the glass was vibrating. He touched one hand to still it and stared at the car idling just in front of his house, some huge old American piece of shite that they must have got from a junkyard somewhere and reconstructed, maybe. It wasn't like they could afford the petrol that would power that thing, but then again, whoever this was, they probably weren't too on the up and up.

He threw up the sash and just leant on the sill, glaring at the car. The windows were tinted, he could tell that even in the dark, because they were sitting under a light, and one in the back was cracked open, because a steady stream of smoke poured from it. Dav sighed. This estate had enough problems without people smoking up in their cars right out in the street.

From here he could hear the screaming lines coming from just over the blaring of the bass: _Nevermind where…cause we preview death…drive-by murder…live burner…shake a barrel…heard of…_

His feet itched as the vibrations rippled up the pads to his ankles. Under his hands the sash groaned a little.

"One of these days the houses are just going to cave in," he mumbled and then pulled the paintball gun he'd got from Manny at the warehouse and checked it. "All right, you twats," he told the car, and lifted the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel, his eyes blurring with the _bwommmmmmmm_ even without the window. Oh lord, it was his eyes, as well.

Finally, someone across the road turned on their light and opened their upper bedroom window. "Oi!" Gladys screeched, half-hanging out the window, "fuck off somewhere else, you—"

Dav watched, still sighting down the forgotten paintball gun as Gladys, her window, her voice and the rest of her house simply fell, collapsing straight down like a house of cards and taking the houses on either side until there was a pile of rubble, and the car burnt rubber off into the night.

 

 

"Well, what did they say about the rash on his—" Gwen sat back in her conference room chair and waved when Gretchen trotted in, her hands full of paper bags and medical files. From here Gwen could see Lois doing some last minute list-ticking, and Dee was probably still in her office. She usually forgot about these things. Gwen wondered if she forgot, or if she 'forgot, finger quotes'. Lois would drag her out and they'd wait for Maggie, because they always waited for Maggie.

She listened to Rhys with half an ear as he told her about what they had suspected. "Soy milk? Really?" Gretchen glanced at her and made a face and she rolled her eyes, snapping her fingers and making the 'hand it over' gesture. Gretchen slid the white bag down the table in one push and Gwen dug into it for her jam split. Oh ho, jam split. "No," she said to Rhys when she realised that he was asking about the noise. "Gretchen's eating breakfast—yes, jam splits again."

It was funny how she'd given him permission to nag her about her eating habits, and then when he did it she became irritated. It was also a case of what her da would have said was 'the fooe being on the other shuht', after well, years of her tut-tutting Rhys about large Mandy and her donut-enabling ways, now he was jogging with Duncan in the park every day and she was sitting behind a desk (and occasionally running for her life and often forgetting to eat).

"I'm taking Duncan for ice cream, then," Rhys said, and Gwen smiled into the mobile. "And we won't get you any, jammy-cheater."

She laughed and Lois and Dee entered the room from opposite doorways, as if they had timed it, like one of those cuckoo clocks with the people that came out from either side. If they met in the middle and kissed, Gwen would shut down for the day. Instead they sat at the table, Lois stacking some files and Dee laying out a knife sharpening kit. Maggie clambered into the room, looking harried and still wearing her goggles from her workroom, so that her eyes were three times too wide. She ran into her chair when she tried to sit down, mumbling 'Sorry, sorry!' at it as if it were a person.

There was a little bit of settling and phone disconnection, and a mild lighthearted squabble over an extra split, and then Gwen sat back and ran her finger down the bulletpoints for the briefing.

"Anything overnight?"

Lois tapped her PDA. "Funny readings in Splott." She looked up. "Why is it always Splott? No, really?" When they all shrugged, she scrolled down and stabbed at the screen with her stylus. "A very small spike, actually. We barely registered it, but then, when I did some digging this morning, apparently there was a building collapse." She looked up. "It was in the news as well. Three estate houses just fell straight down."

Gwen gave it thought. "We'll check that out today, then, make sure it's not more than poor building maintenance." On her sheet she scribbled 'Splott (AGAIN!!)' in the margin. "Where are we on this extended, uhm," she paused, reading the word phonetically, "At-tar-rax-ti-max-e-blon—"

"So far behind that it's not even worth mentioning," Maggie complained. "I can't get the damn thing open."

"Is there candy inside?" Lois asked, and Maggie snorted.

"Speaking of open things," Dee interrupted, "Whoever has that box we got off the blowfish yesterday, please relinquish it so I can clear it for weapons." Maggie scribbled a note on her arm in biro.

Gretchen checked the bulletpoints and opened her folder. "Myfanwy," she said, "is agitated and yet up and around. She's ripped apart the most awesome nest that we built her and is in the process of replacing it with a deathtrap of her own devising made from sticks, a plastic water basin, and the sheep bones from this morning's breakfast."

Gwen smiled. "She always did like the sheep bones." And to Gretchen, "No side effects?"

The vet shook her head. "None. No broken bones or strained muscles. She's the healthiest dinosaur alive, which isn't saying much now that I think about it."

Maggie pushed away from the table and used her remote to open the blinds on the conference room so that they could all look out into the atrium, the sun streaming in from the skylight in pillar-like shafts. "Check this out." A few more presses of the remote and it grew even brighter; it took Gwen a few seconds to realise that the windows that comprised almost the entire right hand wall of the building, that connected directly to the eyrie, were lightening. Untinting. The light from the undarkened eyrie suffused the room, and Gwen could see into it, the tall trees and bushes they had planted in the greenhouse-like room, a bit of a tropical feel to it, and up near the top of her view, a shadow moving in the green. Myfanwy making her macabre construction project, no doubt.

"Now that," Ianto said into her ear, "is fantastic." She ignored him. She had to stop bringing him to meetings like this. He'd been quiet all morning, so she thought that perhaps last night had silenced him, but alas, no, Gwen, still going slightly insane, you are.

"In a week or so, after she's adjusted," Gretchen said, standing to walk to the window and stare out it across the Hub to the eyrie, "we'll knock her out again so that I can do a thorough examination." She turned and smiled. "Doctor Harper never did. Something about how she smelled."

Gwen shoved the last of her jam split in her mouth and crossed 'Myfanwy' off on her checklist. "Owen was afraid of Myfanwy."

Dee snorted and finished sharpening her knife, then wiped it down and used it to cut her jam split into eight perfectly proportioned wedges before cleaning it and starting on the next knife. "I can't imagine why."

Lois wrapped the second half of her split into her serviette, saving it for after lunch, no doubt. "Don't be hating on the dinosaur."

Dee blinked at her. "Hatin'. Ha _tin_ '," she corrected. "Where did you learn slang?"

"Right then," Gwen said before they could go a few affectionate rounds about Lois's tendency to pronounce every syllable in the dictionary. "I think I should inform you that last night Captain Jack Harkness made contact."

Everyone froze. Gretchen sat back down in her seat. Gwen eyed Dee without trying to look like she was; the woman had paused on the downward stroke of the knife sharpener, but that was the only indication that what Gwen had said had bothered her, stopped her, made her flinch.

Then the room exploded.

"Is he actually here?"

"Where did you see him?"

"Did he bring anyone with him?"

"Yes, the Plass, and no," she said, waving a hand. Dee's concentration remained almost solely on the weapon in her hands. "He wants to come back."

Lois opened her serviette and ripped the rest of her split in half; so we weren't going to wait for lunch, then. "Is he...is he all right?"

"Fuck that," Maggie said, "are you going to let him?"

"Question," Ianto added, "where does a four hundred kilo gorilla sit?" He crossed behind Lois and leant against the wall, smiling and staring out the glass at Myfanwy's dark shadow.

Gwen picked at the staple in her file, attaching something very important to the front, no doubt. "I don't know," she murmured.

Dee set her knife down and leant on the table, hands folded in front of her. "Frankly, ma'am?"

Oh, Dee. "Frankly."

"You'd be stupid not to bring him on." She disengaged her fingers and waved a hand to indicate the Hub building. "He's forgotten more than we have files on." She sat back and picked up the sharpener. "And that's all I have to say about it."

Maggie sat back, fiddling with her goggle strap. "I would give a lot to have him take a turn about the lab and clear some things up," she offered.

Gwen shrugged. "It's true, and it solves our problem from yesterday. Dee, you're remarkably good and all, but we do need someone…larger. To haul things, or follow suspects into the men's toilet without arousing suspicion." She reconsidered that thought in context. "Well. Instant suspicion."

"What was I supposed to do?" Lois squeaked. "He was getting away!"

"This is why I always had a team of men under me," Dee responded without looking up from her sharpener. They glared at her. "Yeah, I said it."

"It'd be helpful, in any case to have him around, but—"

Gretchen squirmed in her chair. "I'm sure he will be, but, uhm." It was obvious that she was grasping for words, and Gwen was fairly sure that she knew what they were going to be. "If you don't want to hire him, Boss, you know that you don't have to, right?" Gretchen's eyes flitted from Dee to her, and then to Lois and suddenly there was another four hundred kilo _something_ in the room, and it was numbered, four five and six.

They all knew. It had been Torchwood's last official mission, actually, before they had been dismantled by one of the people at this table and then---

"Then I died," Ianto said to her, his eyes dispassionate, his arms still crossed. "But don't let that stop you."

"We don't need a Jack," she said. "We need someone who can do all the things that fall through the cracks, the things that Lois is too busy to think of. We need someone to fetch and carry and cover things up and in general drive the car—"

"I like driving the car," Lois grumbled.

"We need a Ianto," Gwen said softly, "more than anything else."

"Sorry, I'm indisposed," Ianto said.

"I don't know," Gwen said again, and in her heart she didn't want to tell them that she had made up her mind, because she wasn't quite sure how it would look. And then again, she thought as they all rambled through the checklist (distribution of supplies, those papers for that thing are due at that place, and where were all the pencils going?) and split off to get started on the rest of the day, she wasn't supposed to worry about how it would look.

Before she sat with him in the coffeehouse. Before she walked there with him, before she hit him. Before she heard him say her name, she'd already hired him. The paperwork was in a desk drawer, under a few files. Had been since they moved in here two months ago. And whether that made her sad and pathetic or forward-thinking, or wishful-thinking, she didn't know.

"Four hundred kilos is a lot," she mumbled to herself as she gathered her papers. She'd finish this stuff here and then meander to her office for the rest until it was time to head out to Splott.

"Does he make good coffee?" Lois asked in the doorway just before she left.

"The best Iantos always do," Ianto murmured, and Gwen smiled at the papers in front of her.

"No. Wretched. Worst coffee in the universe."

* * *

 

In the viewing room, Lois watched the newscasts simultaneously as she tinkered on the computer. It was a skill that she was cultivating, based on a few hints she'd received from the notes of her predecessor, Ianto Jones:

 _The monitoring software can be set to search for specific keywords in both audio tracks and closed captioning, but as we often need to be on the look-out for things which we don't know we need to be on the look-out, you will find that you will best be served by manual monitoring of news agencies._

If you stop reading here, you will find yourself quite mad in a week or so.

It's true, there's too much to go on, even if you decide (and this is very short-sighted) to merely watch BBC broadcasts. And indeed, you wouldn't believe the strange things we have picked up from the American FOX News channel. Attached is a timetable of each channel and their peak times for information that is usually relevant to us. You will notice that it is a list of twenty international news services, and the most you will have to review on any given day will be approximately an hour in totem.

Look about. Is anyone around? No? All right then, I am about to impart to you one of the best-kept secrets on our planet:

There is only about an hour's worth of real news every day.

Everything else is kittens-in-trees and elections and sex scandals, all of which is nothing new, and its presence on a show labeled "newscast" is a semantic oxymoron. Don't mention this to anyone, because they will roll their eyes and call you a cynic and nihilist, and trust me, you don't need that.

Armed with Mr. Jones's advice, Lois could now play Bejewelled on the computer off and on for the space of two hours a day as ten monitors, some playing sound and others simply running the captions, showed the programmed recordings that she had set up to capture throughout the day. She did all the world news first, and then narrowed to the UK, and then narrowed to Wales and finally, Cardiff. She liked to think that her search method was like a laser beam, though what for, she had no idea.

…"those –ing cars just sit there in the street and play that music, you know what I mean. Where are the police?"

She collapsed another fifteen rows and snorted, and then something caught her ear. She didn't know what it was. A hum in the speakers?

She froze all the feeds with one button and selected the one she'd just heard, unpausing it on its screen, which rolled images of the collapsed houses in Splott (again, sigh), USAR techs, and insurance adjusters sifting through the wreckage.

"They're about in the middle of the night with that wretched music, and you can very well feel it right in your bed. How's that good for structural integrity, eh? Some day that car's going to rattle right apart."

Lois called up the Rift readings from the night before and chewed on the bottom of a pen whilst she watched the tiny minimal spikes go up and down for about ten minutes, approximately the ten minutes before the houses had collapsed. She glanced at the video feed, which was playing a camera view of the collapse, odd in and of itself as the three terrace houses had been in the middle of a row of seven, and the houses on either side simply sat there, sides open as if someone had sheared their walls off. Even if the houses had collapsed, they wouldn't have severed so cleanly from the houses still standing on the other side, obviously.

And the buzzing. She only heard it because she had been listening with headphones. She replayed the audio and filtered out the speaker as he ranted in front of the wreckage. There it was again, a low hum like _whrrrrumwhurrrum_. She fiddled with the different feeds that the Rift monitor picked up but with which they usually didn't bother; it was true that places directly under (or above, depending on how you mentally pictured the Rift in your head) the Rift always had a bit of a reading, so low that they didn't bother setting the sensors to live display the recordings in the daily logs. Instead they went into a folder, like hidden files, and one had to dig to find them. Lois liked to think of the constant miniscule readings in Splott and other Rift-y places as bleed through, not unlike everything in her knicker drawer smelling like Buffy the Backside Slayer when she stowed her Lush purchases in there, except for the fact that the Rift didn't have a smell.

Well, it did, raspberries, but every time she tried to talk about it, Maggie gave her the look, the one that said she was a nutter.

So all right then, look at that. The readings that they usually tossed right in the trash showed that the houses always sat on a bit of a murmur, and wasn't that…not odd at all. Still.

Lois replayed the buzz again, and then she listened to the man describe the events again, the little banner at the bottom listing his name as Dav Lewis. So many Lewises, weren't there? Some day she'd do a monogram.

Regardless, now was a good time to report her findings, and hey, fieldtrip. She pulled out the newscast from the reel, sent it to the sharefolder so that she could access it from the conference room or another computer, and set aside her headphones, looking about for Dee or Mags or Gwen. It was obvious where Gretchen was because the autopsy bay was alive with the sound of a bone saw and The Streets.

She paused the rest of her footage and sighed. Ianto hadn't said what she should do if her video viewing was delayed or interrupted, but she sensed that after they came back to the Hub, she would be staying late to view all the remaining news footage. This was how things got backed up at Torchwood. You stopped to take care of something, crisis or no crisis, and all the other work still needed to be done. And you could never count on having free time to finish it, because your days were virtually booked to begin with. Overflow was simply inevitable.

No wonder Gwen forced them to have days off and take holidays. On her last enforced mini-break, Lois had flown to Paris for two days, the first of which had been spent sightseeing, and the second had been spent in a café, where she had sat and drank coffee and made lists of things she was going to do/improve/fix when she got back to the office (When people had asked her how it was, she'd said, 'relaxing', and she hadn't been lying.).

"Boss," she said, leaning into the doorway of Gwen's office.

Gwen looked up from her ledger. Lois was amused that she still did some accounting on a ledger. Lois had offered to do it herself, and also to put it on a SmartMoney program (or get Maggie to design a new one with columns for 'paid alien snitches' and things like that), but Gwen said that some things needed to be done the old-fashioned way.

"Are we still going to Splott?" she asked, and Gwen glanced at the clock.

"I don't see why not. Did you find something?"

Lois rounded her desk to bend over and open the sharefolder on the computer. "The readings are wonky over there, and there's a tiny spike when the houses collapsed. But see here—" she froze the footage of the houses.

"That's a very tidy collapse," Gwen murmured, peering at the screen. "Could it have structurally broken like that, as a failsafe or something?"

Lois chewed her bottom lip. "I don't know. I could find out."

"Do." Gwen reached over and hit the 'all hands' button that would automatically open the comms in everyone's office. "Who's up for a day trip? Mags, we'll need you."

The bone saw stopped and Gretchen groaned. "I can't. This thing is putrefying at an exponential rate. I'd like to get the carapace off before everything inside turns into a pile of gloop."

"Then you get to stay behind," Gwen finished. "Everyone else pack a lunch." She dug in her desk for a brown paper bag that Lois knew held her lunch—Rhys packed it in the mornings sometimes, and Lois envied the little smiley faces he drew on her paper serviettes.

Dee's office was on the ground floor, and so she was already arming herself and handing Maggie a piece when they arrived. Lois snagged her coat from the back of her chair. "The man who saw it happen, Dav Lewis, says that he only saw it because he was woken by a car sitting out in the street, blasting some sort of music. Hip-hop, rap, something with bass. Rattling bass."

Maggie groaned. "My neighbours have been playing something about 'shaking that ass' for the past three weeks." She shrugged. "I think they're over there getting caned. I keep waiting for the police raid."

Dee gave her a look. "You need a better flat."

Lois nodded. "The car bolted as soon as the houses collapsed." She accepted the holster from Dee and threaded her arms through it. She didn't like carrying much, but at least her coat would cover the gun for the most part. "I'm thinking, what if the car was filled with aliens, or they shot it with some gun that came through the Rift, some destabilising gun?"

Gwen shrugged on her coat. "That's not a bad theory. Drive-by with a sonic disruptor or something, right?"

"But they weren't driving, were they?" Dee interjected, strapping on the last of her gear and picking up one of the travel kits for the back. "I heard that part on the radio. They just sat there for fifteen minutes before the house fell down." She stopped. "If it was from outer space and they were complete morons, then it might have taken them that long to figure it out. Or it could have needed a warm-up time."

Gwen hit the access switch and they flowed out into the garage, still buckling straps and sliding into coats. "Or maybe it took ten minutes to work. They could have been firing that gun the whole time."

"I have a hard time believing that someone out there wanted Gladys Smith dead so much that they collapsed her house," Lois added. "There have to be easier ways."

It was interesting, she noted, how they divvied up the seats in the SUV without question. And she and Maggie got the back whilst Dee took the front and Gwen drove. Lois sensed that in old Torchwood, Gwen didn't get to drive as often as she would have liked, and she was making up for it now. Dee drove the SUV like there was no road and she had a tank, and Maggie spent most of her time complaining about the lack of clutch and peering over the steering wheel and saying, _Oh dear, I hit something didn't I? Did I hit a person? This thing is huge, I just know I hit something._

Dee was going to take Lois out in the carpark and teach her how to do 180s with the emergency brake, and that day couldn't come soon enough.

"If I was going to shoot someone from my vehicle, I don't think I'd announce my presence for ten minutes prior by sitting outside their house and playing Jay-Z's Greatest hits," Maggie said as she got in the back of the TW1.

"You'd be surprised just how stupid some criminals can be," Gwen muttered as she started the engine.

* * *

 

The creature on the table in front of her was liquefying at an alarming rate. Nothing was preventing it, except for the bit that she had put in a vacuum, and that certainly wasn't going to help her dissection. She slid the body parts off into the biohazard bins as they disintegrated and sighed, reaching for the hose and thanking Gwen for having the foresight to make sure the drains in her floor didn't just go out with the regular sewage. Who knew what this thing would do to the water supply?

Her voice-activated microphone clicked on with the sound of the hose and she tapped it off with her thumb. The chunks of creature she had thought to throw into the vacu-box were solid, waiting, suspended. That was most unhelpful, actually, that she couldn't do more than shake the box and stare at them in there. She could wave at them. "Hi there," she muttered. "You're sorted."

Right. Good thing everyone was gone, otherwise she might have come off as more insane than she actually was.

The voice activated machine clicked on. "Someday," she said aloud, "That thing is going to pick up something unfortunate." Perhaps that was the point, anyway. She shut it down and peeled off her gloves. It was half-two and she wanted a cuppa.

She put on the kettle and donned the heavy gloves and vest that she had been wearing on her trips into the eyrie. The freezer and walk-in refrigerated unit that stored the carcasses they were bringing in for Myfanwy were actually accessible through the eyrie, so she didn't have to wheel half a dead sheep past everyone when she wanted to feed their new charge.

It did mean that she had to walk through the eyrie, sometimes with a hungry pteranodon hanging about, hence the vest with the gloves and the leather gorget to protect her neck. She'd laughed at Dee when she'd shown her how to buckle on the leather neck brace, but after her first examination last night and she'd seen the hinged jaw and remembered that bite pressure of a crocodile was over two thousand pounds, Gretchen decided that she'd rather be safe than sorry.

On the other hand, if the thing got its mouth around her neck, this leather collar wasn't quite going to save her, now was it?

Myfanwy was actually so distracted with nest-building and in general scenery-chewing that she didn't pay attention to Gretchen; it was a wonder that she hadn't spent the morning testing the structural integrity of her cage, but then again, Gretchen thought as she glanced up at the titanium framing that held the Plexiglas and transparisteel in place, seeing as how her last enclosure had been an underground cave, maybe she was used to being shut in. Gretchen took some carcasses out of deep freeze and transferred them to the cooler to thaw somewhat before serving; thought about the creature's diet somewhat; and wondered if she oughtn't think about supplementing with more fiber and vegetation. Maybe they could get some sort of substitute meat. Not that she wanted to make a carnivore into a vegetarian, but Myfanwy might get mileage out of something…wheatier. The largest raw veggie burger known to man, maybe.

Not available in your grocer's frozen section. At least the mental image of Lois unwrapping fifty garden burgers and tossing them in a plastic vat was an amusing one.

She uncovered the mini-bin of mackerel that she'd thawed that morning and wished that she had a ventilator to breathe through. These fish were _done_. No sushi-grade for Myfanwy, at any rate, she probably wouldn't care. Gretchen snagged a bottle of what Gwen had told her was 'soylent barbeque sauce' and carried the fish bin out into the eyrie proper.

Myfanwy had finally noticed her, and she was on the ground not ten metres from her when Gretchen shut the door to the cooler with her foot. "Oh!" she squeaked, dropping the bin.

Myfanwy cocked her head, just looking at her. It was human foolishness to anthropomorphise animals, but Gretchen couldn't help but try to evaluate the look she was getting now. Even if it wasn't complex emotion, like _I am curious, yellow_ it was something.

Myfanwy dropped the sheep bone in her fourth finger and let out a gurgling noise that sounded like crooning—

Do not anthropomorphise the dinosaur. Just feed it.

"Hullo there, girl, feeding time, round two? Fish, oh nummers." She squeezed the sauce onto the fish in the bin, but that just seemed pointless; Myfanwy knew this was hers.

Myfanwy took one step towards her, and she kicked the bin in her direction. Gwen had said that Ianto Jones liked to toss them to her to catch in her mouth, that it had been a game, but Gretchen still wasn't entirely feeling it with Myfanwy, and she wasn't about to fling dead fish about like some muppet when the dinosaur in question was still off her game. Perhaps when everyone had a proper length of time to get used to each other.

She stayed long enough to see just what a fish looked like when it was snipped in half in the middle and one part flew up in the air like a cut toenail, then Gretchen backed out of the eyrie and into the Hub atrium, depositing her gear in the box by the eyrie door for the next person, but tossing the Gore-Tex gloves in the sink for a rinse so that they wouldn't stink to high heaven.

The kettle was singing a little—electric kettles never truly whistled like the ones on the stove, and she missed that. Sure modern ones were better all around, but something about that whistle added immediacy to the moment-- _HOT I AM HOT YOU MUST MAKE THE TEA NOW I AM HOT._ She should have known that it wasn't the kettle when she heard it, but it did take her a second to realise that a minor proximity alarm was going off. Someone had touched the outer fence.

Maggie had set up the series of alarms so that they would have a heads up when someone bothered to come down the C road. It happened about three or four times a week, and so the alarm was rather a soft dinging that became more insistent if the person or thing did something more invasive like tried to jump or cut or hit the bars.

Gretchen flipped the alarm off and checked the monitor the CCTV had focused on, guided by the sensors in the bars that pinpointed the location of the breach or intrusion.

There was a man at the gate. At the actual gate, not just the fence, and yeah, he had a hand on the fence, but he was just staring. Gretchen tried to get the CCTV to sharpen, but it had done all it could, and so she switched on the other feed, the one that was limited to the access gate, installed for the rare occasions that they actually had a guest who would need to call through the front door. That camera was much better at depicting a person's face, but the man was just to the right of it as far as it would go.

She chewed her lip and wondered if she shouldn't go out there and see for herself, but then he could have any manner of weapon. She'd have no cover, and that would be stupid. He could just be waiting out there—

Well, she didn't want him to know he'd been spotted, but she needed a closer look. So she did the next best thing—she held the still softly hissing kettle up to the intercom mike and clicked the 'open line' button, letting the speaker there by the camera spew out a quiet gurgle-hiss of sound.

It did the trick. The man jerked his head into view of the camera when he glanced at the intercom.

Gretchen set down the kettle and smiled. "Oh, yes _please_."

* * *

 

Dee listened to Maggie and Lois as they interviewed Dav Lewis about the collapse that had happened right across the street from his house whilst she sifted through the rubble.

"So the car is just sitting there and it's playing this music, you know with the bass, _bom bommmm bom bommmmmmm_ , like that, and it must have been sitting there for at least ten minutes. Some of us have to work, you know, and that's not on. So I gets up because I have this gun—no see, with paint balls, not real ones—an' I figure I'll shoot them up, because some people have to work, oh…"

Dee ran the scanner along the rubble, what looked like a dining room set buried under three storeys and then flattened. The scanner was telling her that there had been something here, but it wasn't there anymore. Traces of Rift radiation, but nothing unfamiliar in the make-up of contents. And the houses had been there forever, so it's not like they had come through the Rift, either.

"Soooooooo," Gretchen said suddenly into the comm, and Dee forgot that there was no beep that signalled the arrival of someone else on the open line.

"Jesus," she griped. "Wear a bell."

"So," Gretchen said again into the comm. "Captain Harkness is hanging about the front gate, looking like the most conspicuous tourist in the history of Great Britain."

Dee sighed and Cooper peered at the rubble in her bin. "Really?" she asked distractedly. "Found us already, has he?"

"What's he doing?" Maggie said into the comm, and Dee started. Maggie was all the way across the street with Lois, and she had forgotten that they were also listening in. Strange, she never forgot things like that before. God help her if she was actually starting to gel with them as a team. She didn't want to think about how they would be the unmaking of her, of her discipline. Sometimes she caught herself _slouching_.

It was all Cooper's fault.

"I dunno," Gretchen said slowly. "Brooding. Standing. Looking dashing. Waiting?"

"You didn't feed him, did you?" Cooper murmured. "They'll never go away if you keep putting food out."

Gretchen laughed. "I just wanted you to know." And then there was a noise that indicated that she'd logged off the call. Why was there a sound of departure sometimes and not one of arrival? Dee would have to ask about that, because it was bloody annoying. She tossed the brick she had finished scanning and dusted her hand on her trousers.

"I don't know about you, but all I'm getting is trace readings, " Cooper muttered to her. "It was as if something was here, or aimed here, and now it's all just rubbish."

Dee ran the scanner along a pile of bricks and sighed. Cooper was right. One part of her wanted to say something, but she looked down at the mess that used to be an upper bedroom, now mashed into a kitchen, and a child's plastic drinking cup smiled at her, little double handles made out of giraffe necks. She wondered why she hadn't bothered to ask about casualties before this.

"Who died?" she asked suddenly, and Cooper glanced up at her. "I mean, were there any casualties?"

"Gladys Smith," Maggie answered, since Lois was still taking Mr. Lewis's statement, asking probing questions, no doubt. "An elderly gentlemen the next house over. Three other adults were taken to hospital along with several children, ages six, three, and eleven. It seems that anyone who was in bed was somewhat protected as they fell down, but the older man had been sleeping in an armchair, and Gladys, of course, was half-hanging out the window, so the upper pane rather crushed her when…well."

Dee stared at the bricks. "You know what's funny about all this rubble?" She glanced at Cooper. "All these bricks. No mortar." She kicked the pile and the bricks fell over. The drywall was a dried out mess and the plaster beyond that had seen better days. Under that was of course the actual contents of the house, and that was less than interesting. But all the dust being kicked up belonged to the red bricks at her feet.

Cooper flicked her a smile and crouched down next to the fallen wall she was examining, running her scanner on it. "Lois, I wonder if you mightn't be able to dig up who built these houses? Construction wise?"

"I'm on it."

Dee pulled off her comm and deactivated it, tucking it into her pocket and leaving the rubble to go sit on the open back-hatch of the SUV. She wiped her hands with a cloth and set about digging into the cooler for her lunch.

Splott was run-down and dirty, working class, of course, and utterly unfamiliar to her. It wasn't that Dee had no contact with people like this, but her upbringing had been decidedly not anything resembling this, and she found it confined and grimy, and not a little depressing. She had decided long ago that it was better to acknowledge the disconnect that occurred on a particular level between certain classes, and she certainly couldn't and wouldn't discriminate because of it; she had picked men and women for her unit based on their merits, and it didn't make a lot of sense to look at their place of birth or residence and say, 'Oh, no, not him.'

All the same though, places like this were filled with people that she had nothing in common with, except for, obviously, the need for air and food and the occasional orgasm. And, she'd admit it, an affection for chippies and football. Dee cared for football a great deal.

She unpeeled her banana and ate a third of it in one bite. It was habit to eat quickly when offsite and on duty, and she'd have to get used to that as well, though with almost a year on the job she doubted that it'd come soon. There was only so much unmaking one could do or tolerate at any given time.

Cooper joined her and dug about in the cooler for her lunch, fished a smashed sandwich in a plastic bag out, and unwrapped it, taking a bite and making a face. "Branston pickle and cheese," she said around a full mouth. "By the by, I've spoken with the building inspector over there and he confirms your no-mortar thing."

Dee shrugged and finished her banana, tossing the peel in an open rubbish bin the few technicians on site were using to scrap rubble. "I've been trying to listen, as well, but I don't hear any humming," she told Cooper. "I think maybe it was just the electronics in the broadcast."

Cooper stuffed her sandwich in the bag half-eaten and instead pulled out another bag of browned apple wedges. Living the high life, she was. Dee thought about getting out the watercress and cucumbers, but the whole small-sandwich construction, whilst something she enjoyed, was an activity for sitting at one's desk or a table. She did have a hard-boiled egg…

"I think you're right. And the more I think about it, I think the car was exactly what it looked like. A bunch of chavs with too much time on their hands, a bit of pot and a stereo system compensating for something, no doubt." She sighed and bit a wedge in half. "The more I think about it, the more it feels like it has to be something in the building. What if there was something _in_ that vanished mortar—" she gestured with the remaining wedge. "What if that something was, I dunno, set off by the bass?"

Dee gave it thought. "It's as good an idea as any, though I have a hard time believing that there haven't been cars blasting bass around here before. Or even in these houses." She gave up on the pretense of not being hungry and pulled the egg out of her lunchbag, knocking it against the side of the SUV and picking at the shell.

"Hrm. Maybe something about the bass frequency?"

"Also plausible."

Cooper watched Dee peel the shell off in almost one whole strip. "You know, we should have a discussion about Captain Harkness," she said.

Dee didn't look at her. It was a bit of a cop out, not to look at her, but at the same time, she didn't know what was coming, and where Cooper would fall in all of this.

It wasn't as if she hadn't been prepared for the eventual return of Jack Harkness. It wasn't even that she thought Cooper would fire her, not when she had gone to all this trouble to train and set her up, to stand up for her to whomever objected to her placement. It was that she wasn't sure what _Harkness_ would have to say about her presence. Hell, she wasn't even sure what he would have to say about Cooper's Torchwood.

On the other hand, she would have bet a great deal of money that Cooper didn't care what Harkness thought of her Torchwood. Not enough to change it.

"I'm okay with it," she lied. "I signed a paper that said I was on your team." She turned to Cooper and blinked once. "And I meant it. So if there's going to be a problem, it's not on my end."

Cooper looked at her, her eyes flicking back and forth and then over the rest of her face, as if she was scanning her with some sort of intrinsic software that could test her facial muscles for emotions such as sincerity.

"All right then."

* * *

 

Gretchen was a little bored by the autopsy report. There wasn't much to say about an alien that she didn't have a name for and which didn't exist in the archives turning into a puddle of viscous ooze before she could do much to it, but she could run a bunch of enzyme analyses and the like with the bucket she'd kept in reserve.

Or she could try to write her autopsy report in sonnet form.

Instead, she filed a few things, left a big batch of reports on Lois's desk, and tried to think of all the words that rhymed with 'mucus'. She played 'Taking Care of Business' from the workstation speakers and slid down the railing on her way from Gwen's office, landing on her rump at the bottom. Once again, these were good things to do when no one was here.

She was googling 'words that rhyme with phlegm' when the comm beeped and she snatched it from a table, fitting it into her ear and locking into the signal. "Finally. I was beginning to think you'd forgotten all about me," she chirped.

"Late afternoon briefing," Gwen said, and Gretchen sat back, eyes scanning a list of words on her screen: _crème de la crème…Jem…carpe diem…diadem…ad hominem…_ "Lois?"

"The estate agent was most helpful, actually. These houses were rebuilt from rubble after the Blitz, but the company who was in charge of their construction, a Charles Lamb Building and Construction, no longer exists." She paused and Gretchen re-arranged the monitors so that she could still see Harkness from her perch at her workstation. There he was, all t-shirty and jeans-wearing. "Seems Mr. Lamb died and his assets were liquidated by the state."

"Gretchen, look up Mr. Lamb in our extended system, will you?" Gwen asked.

Frightfully easy, actually. She did the search in seconds. Ah, processing power.

Her screen lit up with scrolling results, and right at the top was--"Oh, Mr. Lamb." She paused. "I know, I know, it was too easy."

"Easy would have been being able to access the mainframe from these remote pieces of shite," Maggie said sadly. "Someday, I assure you."

Gretchen ignored her. "Right, well then, Torchwood was monitoring Lamb for some fairly lame things, actually. Seems some of the mortar he was using was obtained from a quarry that had been shut down by Torchwood a decade prior, due to an infestation of Ththone Matrix."

"The Matrix?" Maggie said.

"There's a joke about a red pill coming, isn't there?" Dee asked.

Gretchen was so absorbed in the scrolling reports and scanned-in information that she ignored them for a minute or so, enough that Gwen asked, "Are you still there?" and she nodded before realising that they couldn't see her.

"Yes, so, it looks like he wanted to cut some of his corners and the quarry was just _sitting_ there, with no one about, and he knew how to make his own mix, and…there you have it."

"This Th…thone Matrix, what is it?"

Gretchen called up another file and the computer gave a familiar 'ding' that everyone heard and groaned. The 'ding' was always followed by a window on the screen that read: _This file is in queue for scanning. Auth: Ianto B. Jones, Archivist_ followed by a probable date one could expect it to be scanned and uploaded. This one said 10.10.2010.

It was mistaken, unfortunately. That file was soot in the bowels of old Torchwood Three.

"For the love of—" Gwen bit out. "Nothing is ever easy, is it?"

Gretchen scrolled through the file she did have, the one about Lamb and the quarry. "Oh I dunno about that, Boss."

 _Recording Agent: J. Harkness._

* * *

 

Torchwood Three wasn't difficult to find, if you had a vortex manipulator and a vague understanding of Google Earth. He'd already been to the Quay, seen a few sights, taken a tour of Cardiff Castle, tooled around M&S and John Lewis for some more threads that didn't scream 'outer space!' as much, and so that afternoon he took a bus and then found himself walking down the C road to the sprawling complex that _smelled_ Torchwood.

It was a rare smell—cordite and time and…possibly scented candles, which was new.

The building was about sixty metres from the fencing, which was itself about twenty metres from the road, and there were no signs. Jack wished that he'd thought of buying binoculars at one of the several stores he'd visited, but well, hindsight and all. Instead, he stood at the gate and watched the building, trying to ascertain what was inside.

Tall, dark, sprinkled with windows that were tempered to be dark but probably let light in. Carpark on the side with a Saab (Gwen's), a 4x4 and several Japanese cars. A lone bike chained to a rack. On the right, the building shot out into a tall glass house that could have been a green house, but if so, then Torchwood had really branched out into the horticulture since he'd been with it last.

He was itching to get inside. But right now, he didn't even dare lean on the fence.

He wondered who she would have hired. His brain cast up the obvious connections first: Mickey, Martha, that one cop she liked, Andy-something-or-other, possibly that woman she'd worked with when they had been on the lam—Lois? Laura? Velma?

No one was named Velma anymore.

He heard the golf cart before he saw it, zipping around the side of the building from somewhere, one person from the looks of it, unless someone was hiding in the back, and that didn't look likely.

He wasn't about to run, and he figured he'd been caught fair and square, actually. As the cart got nearer he realised that it wasn't Gwen, but someone else, another woman, dark hair in a tail, face round and wide. Big eyes. She wore a labcoat over some sort of dress and he wondered if she was the medic or a tech. Sometimes Toshiko had worn labcoats.

She drove the cart with the relish of a person who liked to do it but rarely had the chance, and she jolted to a screechy stop a few feet from the fence, staring at him, her hands on the wheel.

Okay she was pretty. He liked pretty. He understood pretty. But if she was here, then she was smart, too, and that was always something to consider, regardless of gender. The Torchwood you didn't know always had a potential to be bad, handpicked by Gwen Cooper or not. He memorised her brown eyes and tan skin and the moue of her lips just in case he had to ever describe it (like on a police report, it was a good trick) and when she left the cart, he saw her gun while he was calculating her height. Again, Torchwood and guns. And here he was without. That felt awkward.

"Hi," he said, plastering on a smile. "Captain Jack Harkness."

She blasted a full-watt smile of her own and he had to reevaluate his opinion of British dentistry, because wow. And then she reached out as if she wanted to shake hands through the fence. "Gretchen," she said, and when he touched her palm, he felt something in it. She let go, leaving the live comm in his hand

He considered that for a second, its familiarity, what using it right now might mean for him, and whether or not he wanted that or just thought he did.

"This is Harkness," he said, fitting the piece in his ear. Ah, felt just like riding a bicycle.

"Jack, my stalker," Gwen said, her voice distracted and tinned.

He smiled, but it was for Gwen, not Gretchen, and the woman just crossed her arms and waited. "Can't a guy just drop in to say hello?"

"Ththone Matrix," Gwen said suddenly. "What do you know about it?"

"Enough to take the red pill," he quipped and then waited for her sigh. "No seriously, I'd need refreshing."

There was a pause. Jack smiled at Gretchen and was rewarded with another beaming one in return. "Oh, all right," Gwen grumbled, "Gretchen, stop flirting with your eyeballs and take the captain into the Hub."

He shouldn't have been surprised that she still called it the Hub, but he was. He wondered what other familiar things he would run into, and whether they would be jarringly out of place or seamlessly integrated. He wondered if the changes would be severe enough that he wouldn't think them strange, or whether it would be enough to throw him off balance. And he didn't want to be off balance for this.

Gretchen placed her hand on the scanner and punched in a long string of numbers and letters with the other. And not just punched. She did it in a rhythm, as if that was just as important as the code itself. That would certainly decrease one's chances of getting inside here if they were drunk.

He gave her another smile when she swung the gate open for him. Gwen wasn't finished with him, though. "Jack, be aware that this is not an official hiring. You are not on the team. You are restricted from all unsupervised workstation access, and you are to remain on the main floor of the atrium at all times."

He saluted the air. "Yes, ma'am."

"Gretchen, you have permission to shoot him if he violates those orders."

Gretchen grinned and skipped a little as she rounded the cart. "Stellar."

He sat next to her on the golf cart and she took off as if she could hit forty in one of these things, and maybe she could. But it was a damn sight faster than walking or even running, so he held on and they shot back to the Hub so quickly they could have been launched from a sling.

"So," he said, trying to make conversation, "what do they call you?"

"Gretchen."

"No no, a last name."

"Oh! Jones." She shook her head. "Sorry, it's been a frustrating day."

Jack sat back in his seat and tried not to fall out of the cart when she took a turn around the corner of the building. "Jones, Jones. Torchwood always has to have a Jones."

Gretchen tucked some hair behind her ear and glanced at him. "Sorry?"

He waved a hand as they parked in an open garage bay. "Nothing."

He didn't have time to look at much as they walked through the garage to the atrium, she was hustling him pretty good, but he did notice the identical SUVs in their black, absent of branding, but who could blame Gwen for that? And three, my , my, seemed Ianto's little car-jacking experience had left an impression on her.

He glimpsed the license plates, though: TW00. TW33. He was dying to see if his guess about the one they were currently using was correct.

Gretchen opened the access doors to the Hub and he followed her through into the atrium. It was definitely a better definition of 'atrium' than the room around the water tower had ever been, with skylights and shafts of light beaming from offices on his right, and the other wall with its--

He blinked at the glass wall on his left and its steel door, and the shadow moving inside, on the ground, rummaging about in a plastic bin. No.

"Myfanwy," Gretchen said behind him, her voice coming from right over his shoulder. "We bagged her last night at Barry Island. Well, Maggie did."

"I thought she—"

"Yeah, so did everyone, but the blast at the Hub took out the ceiling, and blocked the exit to that little hiding cave of hers. It saved her from most of the damage; when salvage workers were going through the rubble a few days later, they pried off the door and she took off like a bat out of hell." Jack glanced at Gretchen, but she was standing with her arms crossed, eyes studying the creature in the greenhouse. "God knows how many pets she ate on her way to Barry."

"She had a thing for poodles," Jack recalled, turning from the wall and back to a workstation. The room was littered with at least three of them, several long work tables, doors off into the walls that presumably led to offices and all manner of places. Gwen wasn't worried about the trouble he could get into here, and for good reason. Aside from the massive amount of damage evil!Jack could do with a computer, he didn't have access to tech or weapons.

Gretchen followed him. "Ianto Jones'd had her fitted with a tracker, but it was shot, and so all we had were intermittent beeps and occasional readings. Her residual Rift signature is wonky enough to be unique." Gretchen fitted her comm back into her ear. "We're in," she told him, and he turned to look at the workstation.

"Gwen, it feels as if we just spoke."

"Har har. Okay Jack, you're on a call here with me, Lois Habiba, whom I think you know, and Maggie Hopley, our resident technological genius."

He bit back all manner of sexy comments he might have made in other circumstances and instead glanced at Gretchen, who was calling up files on the wide flatscreen monitor. "Brief me."

"This morning in Splott, three rowhouses collapsed. Witnesses say there was a car playing an inordinately loud amount of bass sitting in the road before it happened."

"Hip-hop will kill ya," Jack mumbled, and Gretchen smiled to herself, eyes still on the screen. He liked Gretchen. She was going to be the one who laughed at all his jokes. He always liked when they laughed at his jokes.

Toshiko had laughed at his jokes. Case in point.

On the other hand, he was putting the cart before the horse here.

"The houses collapsed, just those houses, all three renovated and rebuilt after the war by a contractor named Charles Lamb," Gwen continued, "who got his mortar from a quarry that Torchwood shut down. Point of interest--all the mortar here is gone, as if it's been eaten. And the quarry was infested with—"

"Ththone Matrix," Jack finished, slotting the story into place as he scanned the old file over Gretchen's shoulder a bit. "I get it now." He reached past Gretchen's hand to click on the file highlighted over the word 'Ththone'. "Why don't you just access this—"

 _Ding._

Jack read the script in the window. "Oh," he said.

Gretchen sat back. "Yes, quite."

Gwen was quiet for a moment and then she sighed. "I'm sorry, Jack," and it wasn't about the Ththone or anything else that had to do with this case. Jack could taste it in his mouth, chalky and bitter, like sucking in an alien virus and knowing that you were going to die. The window blinked away when Gretchen cancelled it and he didn't have to deal with being denied by Ianto B. Jones any longer than another split-second.

"There were a lot of things I didn't get a chance to do," Ianto whispered in his ear and he glanced behind him, but there was nothing there. Oh no. Not this.

He cleared his throat. "Okay then," he said a little too loudly, and Gretchen started, then gave him a quizzical look. He ignored her and slid the keyboard in front of himself. "Miss Hopley, is this mainframe still the basic layout of—" he typed a few of Toshiko's super secret backdoor passwords into a new command prompt window and the old red prompt box popped up, filled itself in and logged itself on. "Oh, Toshiko, you were a firecracker."

"What are you doing, Captain?" a voice said worriedly. "Gretchen, what is he doing?"

Gretchen tapped her fingers on the workstation surface. "He's hacking, or something. I'm not up on the lingo. Gwen, should I shoot him?"

"No," Gwen said resignedly. "Jack, what are you doing?"

Jack typed in a command to find the string of old Torchwood employee logs that were classified for Torchwood higher-ups only. That used to be Archie and him and Yvonne Hartmann, and of course the leader of Torchwood Four, if it hadn't disappeared in '41. But it was just him and Archie now, and he figured, after he did all this, he could switch it over to Gwen, or add her on. It was surprising that Archie hadn't told her about this. "You on speaking terms with Archie?" he asked Gwen absently as he sifted through the logs by date.

"Why?"

He shrugged and found the files. Oh, Lucia files. Great, just great. Last thing he wanted to think about was that mess. "No reason. We'll get to it later."

"You're awfully confident that there's going to be a later," Gwen shot back.

He smiled and scanned the text of a file before maximising the window and gesturing at the screen so that Gretchen could lean forward and read it. "Gretchen, is there going to be a later?"

Gretchen skimmed it, her eyes reading the file, smile growing wider. "I'd keep him around, Boss," she murmured. "At least until you learn how he just hacked in and called up a bunch of files we've never seen."

"What?" the unidentified voice murmured again, and he had to wonder if this was Maggie Hopley, resident tech genius. He did love surprising everyone.

"I have access to the classified command logs," he said quickly, mostly because this wasn't the time or place to get into what they were, where they were stored or all that. He'd hand access over later. Just the thought of it was calming, and he hadn't realised that he _wanted_ Gwen to have these things. If he didn't stay on with them, even if she didn't offer him anything, he wanted to sit down and tell her everything, or at least write her a note.

It would be a long note, unfortunately. Maybe he'd get a dictaphone.

"Okay," Jack said, "I'm reading Lucia Moretti's report. It looks like the Matrix are dormant nanite-spores. I think we guessed that they're used in controlled excavation because of the way they react to vibrations. When they get excited, they wake up and, uhm, consume, then when they calm down, they fall dormant again. Just fall right down where they are."

"Into the bricks?" Gwen asked.

"Probably. They like dense molecular make-ups, and they can't go far, but they'll seep into the brick or stone like water into sand."

Gretchen pulled a chair on rollers from another workstation with her foot and rolled it around so that Jack could sit in it, next to her.

"They were in the quarry, from where?"

Jesus, Gwen always wanted answers all the time. All the answers ever answered. "I don't know, the Rift, and then there was the blitz. All those explosions played merry cob with the Rift, actually. After the war, we found tonnes of new things had come through or appeared. Ran our arses off for at least a decade, chasing things we'd never seen before. Believe me, the Ththone Matrix was a one-time thing and it was tame, comparatively."

"It's a good thing you were here," Gwen murmured, and he could hear the wheels clicking in her head, no mean feat for a phone call. "Fortuitous."

"Captain," said a third voice finally. "If it's safe to assume that the Matrix are still about, in the brickwork, how do we draw them out? Could we just…bin them all?" A split second pause. "Oh, and I'm Lois. Lois Habiba."

He smiled. "Lois-Lois, give me a second." He scrolled through the document towards the end. The good stuff was always at the end. Or the very bad stuff, like body counts. "Well, I have a hard time believing that we hadn't found a way to deal with the quarry. In fact, I vaguely remember this oh, here; we got rid of the Ththone last time with—aw man, orgonite. I hate that shit."

There was a laugh, the laugh of someone who knew what orgonite was, probably, and then Jack _knew_ that was Maggie, because only a tech would know this crap. And it was crap.

"I'm sorry," Lois said apologetically, "I don't know what that is."

"It's Jell-O. Jell-O with metal in it," Maggie said, "well, fiberglass with metal in it. People claim that it absorbs etheric energy. You know, chi, ka, vibes."

"Wait, people actually believe this stuff?" Gretchen interjected.

Jack sat back and cracked his knuckles. "It's not been _disproven_ , that whole positive/negative orgone thing. It's just rather…fruitless." He waved a hand. "Oh look, air. I'm a genius."

Gretchen raised an eyebrow and Maggie sighed. Gwen was quiet, probably waiting until they had worked all this out. "So this…Jell-O collects bad vibes." Her face was bathed in scepticism. "Is this what Torchwood used to do?"

Jack smiled at her. "Lucia loved that New Age stuff. You know, put a pyramid on something, call it post-modern."

"Well, if the orgonite worked, then I'm willing to bet that we could see them with a black light," Maggie said. "What with the phosphors and them being spores and all."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Orgonite is bullshit, Maggie-May," he said. "We actually put concrete in the fiberglass. The vibrations we generate make the fiberglass permeable, they go inside, hey some concrete, tasty, you shouldn't have, really." He snapped his fingers. "We end the vibrations, the fiberglass is no longer permeable, and they're stuck in there, mosquitoes in amber."

"See how having him around is brilliant?" someone said in a muffled voice, obviously to Gwen. Jack marvelled at the way this whole thing had pretty much fallen out of the sky and he got to be Mister Saves-The-Day at the best possible time. He could get used to this.

"In the meantime, the black lights will at least tell us where they are. We'll have to wait until dark, though," he said, looking up at the sky through the window. "What is it, five?"

"About that," Gwen answered. "Full dark's around seven. Give you two plenty of time to get here with your orgonite, and the black light bulbs."

"You have orgonite?" Jack asked. New Torchwood Three had definitely gone up in his estimation. Or down, or at least taken a turn to crazy town.

Gwen snorted. "Of course not. But Gretchen will help you _make some_."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Honestly, do you have any idea what—" But Maggie was already rattling things off to Gretchen, and ended with, 'Oh, I'll just email it to you,' and Gretchen was swiveling in her chair ready to leave for the lab. "You people want to make a Jell-O pyramid to catch a bunch of mortar-eating vibrating nanites?"

"Did it work before?" Gwen asked, and he heard the clip in her voice.

"Well, yeah, but it's going to have to be pretty big, and –"

There was a beep and he realised that he was talking to dead air when Gretchen pulled her comm from her ear and stood. "Okay then." She smiled. "I'm actually the medic slash xenobiologist, but I guess I can do some home-cooking for today."

He sighed. "All right then. We need a lot of metal shavings."

Gretchen nodded her head and he followed her towards what was probably the tech lab, where he hoped they had a huge Jell-O mould, preferably one shaped like a scalloped dome with a butterfly imprint in it.

"So, post modern," Gretchen said over her shoulder. "Jell-O with metal bits. That's a little silly."

Jack winked. "You haven't seen silly until you've painted yourself with 'moon oil' and mind-melded with a potted ficus at sunrise." Gretchen raised an eyebrow and he shrugged. "Look, even in the sixties you had to take one for the team to get laid sometimes."

* * *

 

Maggie had the stands set up with the lights, and Lois was jacking them into the power grid through the poles, but the bulb heads were gone, waiting for the ones she'd described in her email to Gretchen. The black lights would fit right into the frame and then she'd just have to plug the connectors in and they'd have themselves a rave.

Dee was arguing with the recovery and salvage workers, most of whom should have been gone for the night, but whom she had recruited in her commandeering style to run security for the barriers that they had put up with caution tape. Gwen was evacuating the houses on either side of the collapse, which wasn't difficult, since they had been emptied mostly anyway when the initial collapse occurred, seeing as how one whole side of each building was open to the elements. If she looked to her left now she could see the toilet of the house.

She was still looking at that side of the street, which was why she saw the SUV come around the corner and slow at the caution tape. The rescue worker stopped the car, but the driver window rolled down and someone inside flashed an ID, Maggie could see it from here, a shiny plastic gleam that must have got them in, because the workers lifted the tape and let the vehicle crawl down the road to park next to TW1.

Gretchen hopped out of the driver side and slammed her door shut, pulling her coat tighter about herself. It was getting a little chilly.

Gwen jogged from the next house over, joining them just as the passenger rounded the corner of the vehicle and Maggie got her first look at Jack Harkness in the flesh.

She thought he'd be taller, was her first thought. She'd also thought he'd be wearing a military coat, and not this cloth thing. Where'd he go, John Lewis?

Gwen clapped her hand on Jack's upper arm, but she didn't hug him. Maggie wasn't sure why she thought Gwen would hug him; she certainly hadn't been expressly cordial with him on the comm today.

Or, she reminded herself, maybe it was because they were currently _working_. Oh, yes. That thing she was supposed to be doing.

"Jack, this is Lois and Maggie," Gwen said through the flurry of head nods and handshakes, and then Jack's eyes fell on Dee, hovering around the back of TW1, and his smile froze in place, even as his eyes turned frosty. "You know Dee."

Maggie waited while Dee and Jack stared at each other. There should have been a tumbleweed. A piano player who could stop playing and close the piano and run away. Some of those western saloon doors to swing back and forth in the silence.

And then Dee nodded her head, and Jack inclined his, and Gwen clapped her hands; everyone unfroze, scattering to put together the lights and drag the orgonite from TW00, leaving Maggie and Gretchen to stare at each other in confusion as to what had just happened.

It could have been a 456 thing. Something about that whole incident had given Lois and Gwen and Dee a bond that was palpable but mysterious in a 'you had to be there' way even though it had just been a year ago, and Maggie'd had a niece screaming her head off mysteriously throughout the whole thing. But still. Now they had added Jack to their little club and Mags and Gretchen were outnumbered two to one.

It shouldn't have mattered, and it didn't truth-be-told. And if it kept Jack and Dee from fisticuffs at this point in time, Maggie was happy with that.

Or perhaps they all were adults here.

Jack and Lois installed the first black light and she heard them making techno rave noises.

Good lord. Cardiff was doomed.

The lights were adjusted in short order and they went on with a humming noise. Maggie pointed one at the wreckage like a spotlight.

The whole thing lit up like Guy Fawkes Day. "Holy fuck," she mumbled, sweeping the light back and forth.

Every brick shimmered as if it had been hosed down with glitter. Behind her, Jack whistled. "That's a lot of nanites," he said.

Gretchen took one step towards the bricks, but stopped well short. "I don't understand. Are they alive?"

Jack shrugged. "Sort of. More like they're…no, go with that for now. It's safer."

"What's the feeling you get when it's like bugs crawling under your scalp?" Lois asked, scratching behind her ear.

"Formication," Gretchen answered over her shoulder.

"Yes, please," Jack mumbled, and when Gwen glared at him, he smiled. "You know I wasn't going to just let that lie there."

Dee left them to liaise with their recruited guards, and Maggie watched Jack watch her go. "So, the bet is that they'll prefer the orgonite because of what?" she asked.

Jack kicked one of the bricks and the Matrix inside it rippled a little bit, but didn't flare up. That had been a worry—people had been breathing in brick dust all day, they all had, and they'd wondered if they'd managed to breathe some of these things in. Maggie held her naked arm up to the black light anyway—nothing there. That was a relief.

"If the only dense material to go after is the concrete inside the orgonite, then they'll simply go in there," Jack said. "Easy to transport. Then we can, I dunno, throw them into a volcano or something."

Maggie frowned. "I don't like this plan," she admitted.

Jack laughed outright. "Did no one hear me when I said this was a terrible plan?" He turned to Gretchen. "Don't you remember when I said this was a bad plan?"

Gretchen didn't even look up. "What? Sorry. Hrm."

Gwen shoved her hands in her pockets and stared at the nanites under the black light. The crowd behind her was still oohing and aahing, and Jack had to have been glad they were there, because it kept Dee on far from him, and wasn't that probably a kick in the balls for him. Maggie would have to completely reevaluate what she thought of Gwen and her vicious streak.

"What's to keep them from deciding that they like the surrounding bricks better?" she asked Jack. It was easy to defer to him, and she wondered if that wasn't because he was a man. That was irritating.

Jack looked at Gwen and shrugged. "I dunno. It worked last time?"

"Oh yeah, this is brilliant," Maggie mumbled.

Jack leant in towards her. "Admit it. You want to see what happens." A wink. A smile.

Okay, she did.

"So how do we get them from here to there?" Gwen asked. "Shall I get a recording of The Chemical Brothers?"

Jack made a face and Maggie grimaced. She looked out over the blanket of glimmering brickwork and bit her lip. "If we position the orgonite around the perimeter, we might keep them contained when we make noise," she posited. "Or maybe if they go towards the noise—"

"We'll have to try that," Gwen said, reaching for one of the pieces of orgonite and lugging it from the back of the SUV. "Maybe if we put them in a circle in the centre of the rubble, and then put something noisemaking in the centre, it's too much to ask that they'd fall for that, right?"

Lois picked up another piece of orgonite. "What shall we put in the centre? I could borrow someone's stereo, but I don't think the bass will be enough."

Jack glanced at the SUV. "How's that system?" he asked, and Maggie bristled.

"You're not using Twun as bait!" she exclaimed and Jack grinned.

"I knew it. Twun Twoo Twee." He glanced at Gwen. "Cute."

Gwen hefted the orgonite and grunted. "Lovely, but no. No using the SUV as bait. Something else, something that makes a resonating thumping sound." Her eyes cast about the wreckage and salvage equipment, and then she smiled. "Oh. Brilliant."

Jack's eyes followed hers. "What are you thinking?" Then he saw it as well. "Oh."

Positioning the twelve pieces of dome-shaped orgonite that Gretchen and Jack had made was easy work. Getting the salvage worker to part with the equipment was another thing. In the end, Gwen'd pulled the 'This is secret service business' card with him, which was fairly easy since the Torchwood badge was pretty ominous-looking. They were out in Splott so often that they were folk legend anyway; Maggie didn't get why Gwen just wouldn't say they were Torchwood right from the start. Old habits died hard, she guessed.

"If this goes badly, we'll have to shut this thing down and retcon half of Splott," Gwen said, as Jack pulled on a pair of leather workman's gloves. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

Jack stepped into the center of the orgonite circle, looking for all the world like he was going to do some sort of New Age summoning thing, but instead he picked up the handle and examined it, probably for the 'on' button. Maggie could have told him it was the big red one.

Jack turned the machine on and the thumping began. "It's called a _jack_ hammer," he said loudly. Maggie took the earphones from Dee and stood back, away from the rubble, watching and wondering what the Matrix was making of all of this.

It was getting agitated, that much was clear under the black lights, as the bricks that had merely been shining before were all but glowing, and the bricks, if she actually looked past the gleam to the structures themselves, were starting to collapse, leaving behind puddles of shimmering nanites.

"I'll be damned," she whispered as the nanites flowed towards the big half spheres of orgonite, slipping through the molecular structure of the fiberglass and coalescing in the concrete, where they continued to glow. But they weren't leaking back out and they didn't seem to be slowing.

The black lights rattled and shook with the vibration, and Maggie was starting to feel it in her feet and her teeth. Jack was shouting something, but by the rhythmic motion of his mouth, it looked like he was singing. Dee held the crowd back with the techs as they shied and buckled around the barriers, jostling to get a better view of the last of the nanite streaks as they coiled into the orgonite and stayed there, glowing.

And then they were left with twelve glowing domes and a man with a jackhammer. The wreckage was just furniture and possessions and drywall and plaster, now, all the bricks gone, piles of shingles drooping on the broken wooden frames of what used to be the roofs.

Jack stopped the jackhammer and set it down, then wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, turning to them. "Don't ask me to explain this to you," he called out, because they were all standing so far away. "I didn't think it would wo—"

Then the ground under him gave way and everything in a three-foot radius of him plummeted straight down.

"Jack!" Gwen screamed and ran forward, but had to stop short to peer over the edge of the hole. Maggie waved a hand at Dee and Lois, gesturing to the lights. "Switch them out, come on!" The black lights were useless now that the Ththone Matrix was trapped in the orgonite, and even though they still glowed, they weren't an effective light source. Gretchen took two mag-lite torches to the edge and she and Gwen shone them down in the hole while Maggie and Dee unplugged the connectors in the framing and Lois dragged over the heavy bulbs in their metal casings.

There was no noise from the hole except for the shifting and settling of dirt and metal and the flapping of shingles falling in.

"I think he…jackhammered the ground until it was unstable," Maggie muttered. "We should have thought of that."

Dee shrugged. "He'll live," she said. "Really, don't worry."

Maggie risked a glance at Dee, who was busy mounting the regular lights. "It still had to hurt," she said crossly. Dee saw the big picture a little too much sometimes, like this afternoon when it had taken her hours to ask after the casualties, even though the rest of them had known almost as soon as they had got there. Maggie had asked a fire fighter.

"Stand back, stand back." One of the techs on standby approached with a rope that he clipped to his belt and ran from the truck near by. "All right, I'll get 'im."

They watched the man disappear down the hole, and by the time they had got the regular sodium lights hooked back up again and lit up the place like an M&S Christmas display, they heard the man call up from what Maggie now believed was the basement floor. "No pulse! I need a medic!"

There was conferring, and Gretchen clambered down using the rope attached to the tech's waist. Maggie had to say this for Gretchen—she wasn't afraid of much. She wondered if Gretchen had always been this way, or if Torchwood had made her fearless. That could be a danger sometimes, she surmised, thinking that because you were Torchwood you were stronger somehow. The files upon files of dead employees in the system told the falsity of that theory.

Gwen waited for something, possibly a signal from Gretchen before she turned and glanced at them, and Dee dusted her hands. "Right. Get a litter from emergency services. We have to do this quickly."

Maggie followed Lois to get the litter and wondered if this was the only time they'd ever have to pretend that Jack Harkness was alive as they carted his carcass away, or the first of many.

* * *

 

Jack sat in front of her desk and ran his hands along the edge in front of him. Gwen smiled and waited while he got used to the idea of sitting at a desk again. She was going to dock him at one for a while anyway, so he could look at all their recent files. That was going to strop him. Gwen found that she didn't care.

"Are you ready?"

Jack closed his eyes and flattened his palms on the blotter. "Who's ever ready for this, Gwen?"

He had a point there. Gwen pressed the combination of buttons on the phone and cradled the receiver in her shoulder as she negotiated the maze of screeners, providing passwords that she didn't mind saying aloud because they'd be changed next week. Finally she heard the appropriate voice, and she handed the receiver to Jack, who took it dubiously and pressed it to his ear.

 

"Good evening, Your Majesty," he said in a jovial tone that didn't match his face. "Yes, it's been a while." His eyes darted to Gwen's face and she tried to read what was there. Was that misapprehension? "No ma'am. Yes, yes ma'am…" His fingers toyed with the spiral cord of the desk phone, an action that he must have been doing for decades, archaic, leftover. How many phones had cords anyway? Gwen had asked for one because she always lost the portable under papers.

"I can explain that ma'am," Jack continued. "Well, yes…"

Gwen left him there, sitting rigidly in the chair, eyes boring holes in the blotter on her desk. That was going to be a long talk.

All in all, it had been a shorter talk than she had figured. Maybe Her Majesty was tired. Jack had to be knackered. Immortality aside, he'd been through a bit today, a full day's work, well, a half-day's work, but then to cap it off with falling down into a basement and being impaled on some stray rebar, that had to take the fire out of anyone. On the rare occasions Gwen'd had to see Jack after he had died (and they had been surprisingly few, she recollected, in the long and short of things), when everything was over, Jack always looked like he could stand to lie down for a few hours, which was saying something.

Jack left her office and sauntered down the steps to join her in front of the eyrie windows.

"I can't believe we caught her," Gwen mused. "I don't even know why it was so important that we did." She reached out and knocked on the glass with one knuckle. "I had this planned before I knew it was even possible to track her down again."

"Wishful thinking?" Jack asked.

She thought about that. That, and the paperwork in her desk drawer upstairs, just waiting for a few missing spaces to be filled in. "Something like that."

"I like your Torchwood," Jack said suddenly. "I never thought—" He stopped, obviously not pleased with the way that had begun, and instead switching tracks. "I'm always amazed at the way people interpret things differently." He turned to her, hands tucked under his arms. "I built my place under the ground, secret and dark, hidden. You came from that, but still, when given the chance to interpret it, you did this."

Gwen turned to him and looked up at the Hub over his shoulder, at the windows and white and green walls, the open spaces and the general singing nature of it, all curves and softness, in a way. The glass walls of the eyrie and the armoury on the other side, lit with gentle fluorescence even when everything else was shut down. Lois's computer screen faced her and scrolled text in pastel letters, 'Torchwood One' over and over again in different sizes and fonts.

"I had to make it different," she admitted. "I wish I could say it was just to improve, but it was…" she shrugged. "It was everything down there. It was sad and too much like them."

She didn't have to say who 'them' was.

Jack reached out with one hand then, brushing her cheek, and it occurred to her that she hadn't quite let him touch her since he'd seen her the night before. She'd touched him, but he hadn't held her, hadn't laid a finger on her. She unfolded her arms and fell into him a little, feeling his arms come round her waist, pulling her in, and she buried her face in his clean t-shirt, pressed her face into the hardness of his chest, and the warmth that he always seem to radiate. She could feel his cheek when he kissed her temple.

"So, she gave you a bit of a dressing down, didn't she?" Gwen murmured into his chest, and one of his hands pressed on the small of her back. It was good, this moment, when they could stand there, pressed together, the last two remnants of Torchwood Three, the only evidence left that the world had been saved before.

Jack was very quiet, but she could hear him breathing through his nose, the way he did when he was trying not to cry or over-think things, and she wondered when they would unfold the things between them, flatten them out like a map to see just how far apart they were. It would be a long time coming, she guessed, and she wasn't going to press it.

But Jesus, she wanted to talk about it. Ianto, Tosh, Owen, even. The Hub, Janet, the fucking SUV, the everything. She wanted to talk about Steven and Dee and that moment he had almost laughed at her before he blipped away up into the sky and fucked off to wherever. She wanted to ask what he had seen in the stars—planet and shadows, galaxies and revelations.

Oh, but she was too tired, and the clean-up had taken forever. Maggie and Lois had finally just left, the orgonite stored in the warehouse until other plans could be made for the Ththone Matrix. Rhys had scrapped her dinner, chucking it into a Tupperware container and freezing it for lunch later this week. All she'd had to say was the word 'Jack', and he had somehow just understood.

 _Spoiled. For. Men._

"She's entitled to dress me down," Jack said flippantly, finally. His hands patted her back as a signal that it was time to disengage. Gwen pulled away to look at his face, but he was already in 'Hey, it's me' mode. He clapped his hands and peered at the rodent tubing to their left. "So, you want to tell me what you're doing with a set of pittins?"

Gwen blinked at the conversational 180. "Of what?"

"Pittins," Jack said, opening the closest box in the tubing system and scooping out Sam, or Dean, it was hard to tell. The ball squeaked and Jack held it in one of his massive paws, holding it close to his face. "They were popular household pets for a long, long time, hardy, which is good on outer planets, but about as smart as a third grader who can do calculus, maybe." Jack smiled at the pittin and its nose twitched.

"Jack, are we re-discovering nostalgia?"

Jack ran two fingers along the pittin's spine. "I used to get mine to do my differential equations." He shuffled the creature from one hand to the other, reaching for an open bottle of water on Gretchen's workstation. "It was a thing for a while, kids getting the pittins to do their maths homework. And plus—" he tipped the water bottle, pouring about three ounces all over his hand and the pittin. It squealed and Jack set the bottle down, then held the pittin in both hands and massaged the water into its fur, which turned from brilliant red to blazing green everywhere it was wet. "Ooooh, a holiday one. A gift for Earth winter solstice." He glanced at her. "Red and green, Christmas."

Gwen blinked. "He's…hydrochromic." Already the tufts of fur that Jack blew on at the pittin's head ruffled as they dried and changed back to red.

"It's hydrochromic," Jack said. "They're all genderless."

"Where do they come from?"

"A lab. Pittins are a hundred percent engineered, never happened in the wild. Can't even breed in the wild."

"You haven't seen the two of them after potpourri time," Gwen muttered.

"I said breed, not hump like rabbits. Rabbits, by the way, of which they are part." Jack set the pittin back into the box and closed the lid. "And kittens. Hence the name—Pittins: Pseudo-kittens."

Gwen smiled at the two pittins in the Habitrail. Gretchen was going to flip (She wasn't the only one; Gwen suspected that Dee got them out of their cage and let them run around on her desk when she was here by herself.). "Pittins," she mumbled. "You're making this up."

Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I named mine Phlegm."

"Typical boy."

Jack backed up a step and glanced about. "Oh come on, what did you girls name them? Princess Moonbeam and Shines-a-lot?"

"Sam and Dean."

"I stand corrected." He pulled his hands from his pockets. "I uh, where's the loo?"

Gwen pointed behind him. "All the way down."

"Thanks." Jack started for the toilets and turned towards her, walking backwards. "You can tell a lot about a place from its toilets." And then he double-timed it away, leaving her standing next to the pittin cage and thinking about how Jack had illuminated a mystery in less than five minutes, and Jesus, if that wasn't reason enough to have him, she didn't know what was. Because the best usage of someone like Jack, if he was going to be here on this planet anyway, was right here in her Hub.

For a second she flashed on the image of Jack in a giant human Habitrail, running about the Hub, up and down and all around, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a big wall-mounted bottle, and her stomach flipped. She glanced at the pittins and wondered if—

No, there were enough liberated things running about this facility.

She was in her office when Jack appeared a few minutes later, leaning in the doorway and crossing his arms. "So, who put the scented candles in the loo?"

She smiled. "Pass inspection?

"'Raspberry Delight' isn't your best olfactory choice."

"Is it ever?" she countered, and he shot her with a gun finger to concede to her point. "So, back on track. I want to go home. What did She tell you?"

Jack sat down in the chair in front of her desk and slouched a little. "If you'll have me, I have Her permission to be hired." He gave her a stern face. "I am not to be in charge."

Gwen nodded. This was pretty much what the secure communiqué she had on her computer said. "I'm sure we can find uses for you. Maggie wants your brain already."

His smile was liquid gold. "Aw, just my brain?"

"Now, none of that. Interoffice romances are—" she broke off because anything she might say after that would be poison. It would sound like a condemnation. "I just. We just...we all agreed—"

He waved a hand. "It was a joke," he said slowly, and the tone in his voice was just as bad as hers had been. Sluggish, cold water moving under the ice.

"All right then," she said, remembering the very words she had said to Dee earlier in the day. That had been another surprise, though by now she didn't know why she should be surprised. Dee was a soldier, Jack was a soldier. If either one of them had been, oh say Owen or Gretchen, she probably would have expected more outrage, apoplectic fits, yelling, rounds of _J'accuse!_

Gwen slid the papers across the desk to him. "And here you are. Everything official. Salary and all the trimmings."

Jack shrugged. "I remember when they used to just throw a few bills at me."

Gwen smiled. "You're worth more than that, Jack."

He leant forward and flipped a few pages, reading the contract. She waited. She didn't know why he read it all, word for word, when most people just skimmed. That alone should have told her that she had made the right choice here. She knew he'd find the part where she'd written his position in just a few moments before. It had been hard to settle on something that she felt was actually appropriate.

"'Jack of all trades'," he muttered. "Never let it be said you aren't witty."

"I am a woman of many talents," she said, folding her hands into a steeple and watching him select a biro from her cup full of utensils.

When he had finished the last signature in his copperplate scrawl, and she had whisked the forms up into a folder and shut them into a drawer, he toyed with the pen and stared at the pictures on her walls: some old Torchwood archive photos of previous employees in sepia, becoming increasingly modern all the way up to the last one of the five of them in the old Hub, one they'd taken with a timer on Tosh's webcamera one night after they'd had a few drinks to celebrate a smooth week. Did he notice that he was only in the last photo? She had deliberately chosen photos that Jack was absent from, not because she hadn't wanted to see him, but because she didn't want to display the obvious about Jack. Would he think of that? Or would he think that she had wanted to not be reminded of him?

"Do you want to go back to the hotel tonight, or…?"

Jack slipped her pen back in the holder. "Nah, I'm beat. She told me." He didn't meet her eyes. "It's a good idea. Show me my new digs."

Gwen hadn't been big on the idea that Jack Harkness would be living at the Hub, but she hadn't had a choice in that one. And when she could think of a way around it, she was going to set the man up in a flat somewhere with many, many windows.

She led the way down the stairs and towards the back of the atrium, almost to the garage bay access doors, but veered left at the last minute and opened a door to the last office in the row, flipping the lights on with a finger.

The desk was sterile, old wood yeah, and a nice creaking leather chair and an incandescent reading lamp, but there was nothing personal marking it. She hadn't gone so far as to stencil his name on the door, but she might as well have. They had all known that this was his office, and that the room below it, with its round entrance and metal ladder was also his.

Jack snorted when he saw it, but he didn't protest or make any other noise.

"This is your room," Gwen said, as they climbed down the ladder rungs, fingers fumbling for the pull catch of the light. "I didn't want to build it at all, and well, if I did, I might have ordered something less…well." She dusted her hands and looked about at the dim incandescent bulb, the ratty dresser that it had taken her weeks to find in a charity shop, the camp bed sent over from military surplus.

Jack's face was a mask. "What, no cut flowers?"

Gwen raised an eyebrow. "Your room specifications are in the charter," she told him. "Her Majesty said to build it just as it was." She shoved her hands in her pockets. "I think she was upset with you."

He turned in the space, eyes looking all over the area, not that there was much to look at. There was a toilet and bathroom with all the current amenities (Lois had added the bidet for fun, she said), Gwen had seen to that, just off to the side, but the room had been dug and poured special, there was nothing attached to it underground. Safety, for Jack, the told herself, and as Dee added, safety for them all in other ways.

Dee had helped them pour the concrete.

Jack fingered the picture frame in the dresser, an old second-hand frame with a singed picture of Estelle. "You found some things in the rubble, huh?"

Gwen cocked her head and felt the quirk of her mouth. "It was illuminating."

"Did you find—"

"Gray is dead. They all were." Gwen sighed. "The cryo units all thawed, and they weren't stable." She pulled her hands from her pockets and put one hand on the rungs of the ladder at eye level. "The morgue was much the same way, save one or two miracles."

Jack just picked up another picture, this time one of Gwen and Rhys and Duncan that she had added herself, not sure why, spite maybe, maybe she thought Jack would care. "Who are the lucky winners?" he asked, probably because he realised he was supposed to and not because he cared.

Gwen was two rungs up when she decided to tell him. "Tosh. And Suzie." The frame thudded to the dresser top. "Seems Ianto was quite careful about their strategic placement. Oh and someone from the past, Emily Holroyd?"

Jack laughed, more a chuckle, and Gwen glanced back at him, pausing her climb. "Trust that bitch to land butter side up, even dead."

Gwen had read the files. In fact, when she hadn't been building or planning or hunting, or commanding or killing something or vomiting or in labour, all she had been doing was reading. Everything that she was sure Ianto or Jack would know, it was all hers now. Tosh and Owen she could never be, but those two had been keystones in her arched bridge, and she'd had to find substitutes until she'd figured it all out. Those replacements were her brain, and a handful of women who were trying their best, but were rawer than she was.

Jack sat on the bed. Gwen looked down at him. Jack's eyes were on the floor, as if he was trying to determine the molecular composition of the braided throw rug she'd laid for him over the concrete. She wondered about where he'd been, what he'd seen, and how it must feel to have been out in the stars less than two days before and now to be bunking in a ten by ten foot cell, no matter how 'familiar' it might be.

"If you don't need anything, Jack, and of course, the Hub is yours—"

"It's not mine," Jack said. "I just live here."

Gwen took one rung back down and he raised his head, smiling, wry, sad, tired. "It's convenient, I don't sleep—"

Gwen jumped the rungs down and sat next to him in one movement, which was easy because his room was fucking miniscule. "We have to lay a few rules," she said, waving a hand, then staring not at him, but the poster she'd framed for the wall, an old vintage reproduction of the Casablanca film advert. "The first is that we're not going to lie. Especially about things that are important, if not critical."

Jack smiled at his hands and then at her, and there was a twinkle of something. "I don't think I can even understand what that's about."

She sighed and fell backwards on his bed. It was a lot more comfortable than she'd imagined. "'My father was a master tailor'," she murmured. "'I abandoned my brother and it's been haunting me ever since.'" He fell back next to her and they pressed together, shoulder to shoulder. "Nineteen sixty-five."

Jack patted her thigh and squeezed, but it wasn't angry or sexual. "'I had sex with Owen while—'"

"Precisely," she said. "Need to know means need to know." Her arm bent at the elbow and she clasped his bicep with her fingers. "It's going to be hard, for us, not for them."

He bent his own arm and put his hand on her hand on his arm. "This doesn't change the fact that I don't sleep." His voice sounded harsh and sad, and not a little bitter. Gwen wondered what he'd found out there in the stars that had sent him back here, to this planet of death, sent him hurtling back through the universe like a comet making a pass around the sun.

"Are you tired?" she asked.

He mimed snoring and she hit his leg, then grunted trying to right herself. Jack pushed her back into sitting position and she stood, grabbing the rungs again. "Gwen," he said suddenly, and she turned to look at him, sitting on the edge of the bed, jeans and t-shirt, boot feet splayed and toes pointed inward, like every schoolboy photo she'd ever seen. He gave her a smile, and it was hard to interpret, and maybe that was the point.

If she hadn't been married, she might have had something to say about that smile, about those shoulders and that comma of hair over his forehead like Superman at the end of the day. But she was, so she gave him a smile of her own. "Jack. I missed you terribly."

He didn't say anything, and she wasn't put out by that, instead she climbed the rungs of the ladder and out of the hole, then up to her office to grab her coat and purse. She turned out the lights in the Hub with her remote as she walked (they'd have to get Jack one if he wanted), than she thought better of it and doubled back to Jack's office to turn his lights out.

His hole was still lit when she went in, and she thought to pop in and ask if he wanted the lights on up here, but then she heard Jack's voice, quiet but steady. "Oh, I had wondered when I would see _you_ again." A pause. "No, don't go yet."

Gwen wondered about the difference between needing and wanting, her hand sliding along the wooden edge of Jack's desk as she wavered there, wanting to look over the edge of the manhole but not needing to.

"You used to complain that this bed wasn't big enough," Jack said, voice louder now that he was more at ease. "Yeah, that's what I said, and it worked every time, didn't it?"

Gwen still wasn't sure who he was talking to, but it was someone, some thing, some ghost, some love, some friend, some—

"That's my favorite tie, you know."

Gwen turned and left him to it, flicking the lights with her remote.

* * *

 

 _Halfway down the stairs  
is a stair  
where I sit.  
There isn't any  
other stair  
quite like  
it.  
I'm not at the bottom,  
I'm not at the top;  
so this is the stair  
where  
I always  
stop._  
\---A.A. Milne, 'Halfway Down the Stairs'

END

**Author's Note:**

> 1) The song playing with the sonic bass, and whose lyrics appear is [Fuck Tony Montana](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q7Evq9lCTs) by La Coka Nostra.
> 
> 2) [What is Orgonite?](http://www.orgonite.info/what-is-orgonite.html)
> 
> 3) "Pittins" are actually a word I stole from Star Wars (Barbara Hambly, to be exact), and the pittin has a Wookiepedia page [here](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pittin). My pittens are less kitteny and more hamstery. And you know. Physics and shit. I also stole vibroblade and transparasteel. Hey, it's better than transparent aluminum.
> 
> [Extended Scene](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492357.html#cutid2)   
> [Soundtracks](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492599.html)   
> [Master Post](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/493268.html)


End file.
